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Drowning in Footwear
Drowning in Footwear is most likely Jesse Wood's first venture into the world of making videos for the internet. It gave birth to the spinoff channels Drowning in Horseshoes and Drowning in Kayfabe before evolving into Endless Jess. Its slogan was "Rants. Reviews. Music. Ponies." Name The phrase "I'm drowning in footwear" as well as the audio clip played at the end of Footwear videos, comes from an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in which a sleeping Spike unexpectedly shouts "I'm drowning in footwear!" before waking up and remarking that he had a "weird dream." When asked at various times why he chose then name, the Endless One has responded "cause I'm a real heel." History The channel premiered in October 2011 with a video called "Demons Souls Review- Drowning in Footwear", which was posted on the That Guy With the Glasses forums. It was here that Jesse met and befriended the other members of the Broken Down Geeks before realizing how shit the TGWTG forums were and abandoning them. Video game reviews would go on to be come a main feature of the channel, though as its slogan suggests, Drowning in Footwear featured a fairly miscellaneous assortment of videos beyond reviews, much like Endless Jess today. The Drowning in Footwear reviews fit well into the genre of character and comedy driven reviews pioneered by reviewers like James Rolfe (the Angry Video Game Nerd) and Mike Stoklasa (Mr. Plinkett), although Jesse emphasized that the Footwear Man was not intended as a separate character, at least early on, from himself. Still, his personal charisma and the emotional content of his videos were a large part of the appeal. Although they're not as polished as his later videos, the Drowning in Footwear videos exhibited many elements that would come to characterize much Endless Jess's later work, such as exaggerated self-deprecation and self-aggrandizement, satire of the audience and of other reviewers, carefree political incorrectness and, of course, drinking. This channel also featured the debut of Colt Corona in the 2012 review of Altered Beast. His character was further established in the song Equinas Vaginus, now on Horseshoe Heaven and the review "Colt of Personality: The Crystal Empire", now on Manchild Inc. The channel was slow to take off and had few subscribers for the first few years, although it had an early semi-viral hit with the song "Reapers." In late 2013 Jesse created Drowning in Horseshoes and shifted most of his focus to that channel, although a few Footwear videos did come out in that time. In June 2015, shortly after Horseshoe Finale, which also served as a finale to Drowning in Footwear, the video "R.I.P Footwear" was posted, a sort of highlight reel of Footwear and Horseshoes set to the song Get Up On the Raft by Liam Lynch (which repeatedly features the line "we're not drowning anymore"), followed by the official announcement of the Endless Jess era and the channel's rebranding as Endless Jess. Deleted videos Many of Drowning in Footwear's early videos have been deleted from the channel by Jesse, leaving behind only a few gems from the first few years. Almost all videos featuring ponies were deleted so that they could be reposted on Drowning in Horseshoes (or later, Horseshoe Heaven) but Jesse has also suggested that many videos were deleted and not reposted because he no longer felt they were up to his standards of quality, leaving their brilliance and/or clinginess forever lost to the world.